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AUSTRALIA

Making a difference in the age of high-speed politics

  • 17 February 2015

The ancient Chinese text the Zhuangzi tells of a kingdom where the people rose up and killed their ruler three times in succession.  The next-in-line to the throne, Prince Sou, fled for his life and hid in a cave but was pursued by the people, who smoked him out of the cave and took him back in the royal carriage to become their new ruler.

According to the Zhuangzi, it was Prince Sou's rejection of the throne, his refusal to harm his own life for the sake of political power, that proved to the people he was worthy to become king.

Australia has seen two of its rulers 'killed' in succession since 2010, with a third and current prime minister now perilously close to extinction. In each case the people have provided not the mechanism but the motive, with plummeting opinion polls driving internal party revolt against elected leaders. 

Are we approaching a point where the highest expression of political wisdom would be not to run for leadership at all?

In general, our politicians give the impression of being full of ambition with a powerful sense of individual worth. Success in politics requires such qualities, yet these qualities can also blind people to the harms and the costs of success in a politically dysfunctional era.

Like Abbott or loathe him, one must wonder how much of his original self, his private ideals and innermost convictions remain intact as the conditions of leadership demand ever more compromise from a man whose DLP and Catholic roots supposedly distinguished him from the economic liberal ideologues within and around the party.   

Less ambitious observers might wonder why Tony Abbott persists; or, equally, how Julia Gillard now reconciles whatever prime ministerial hopes and ideals she once had with the undoubtedly bitter reality of her few years in office. Gaining the world but losing one's soul springs to mind, but it wasn't even the world they've gained, just a few harried and embattled years at the head of fractious government.

Those of us motivated more by idealism or by the simple desire for strong and stable governance cannot help but feel dismayed and discouraged by the now half-decade of leadership instability and political melodrama that persists like the dying seasons of a once-popular TV show.

What we fail to appreciate is that politics has always attracted but now demands candidates whose self-assurance insulates them from these struggles, the kinds of
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